The living room was quiet in the way of a space occupied by someone who was not relaxed but was performing relaxation well enough to convince herself. Aurora sat back against the couch cushions with the television on at the ambient volume she used when the television was texture rather than content, and counted.
She had been counting since she got home.
The evening had gone the way she had needed it to go—dinner at the kind of restaurant Ray chose when he wanted to demonstrate something, the easy, proprietary warmth of a man taking a woman somewhere he knew would impress her, the conversation moving through the comfortable register they had developed over weeks of these evenings. She had been present and pleasant and had eaten the food and laughed at the right moments and let him hold the door and had looked, she was confident, like a woman who had been on a date and had enjoyed it.
